Psycholinguistics - uni-saarland.de is Psycholinguistics? - Which psychological and neurological factors underlie language acquisition, language production and language comprehension?

Psycholinguistics

Preparatory course Language Science and Technology: PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 10/17/08

Outline

I What is Psycholinguistics?

II The Computational Psycholinguistics Group at Saarland UniversityIndividual Presentations by the group members

Preparatory course M.Sc. Language Science and Technology: PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 10/17/08

What is Psycholinguistics?

- Which psychological and neurological factors underlie language acquisition, language production and language comprehension?

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental representations andprocesses that are involved human language processing


- What are the architectures and mechanisms of language processing?

Human Language Processing

very fast, seemingly effortless, mostly correct, excellent coverage

Human language processing is incredibly efficient


Compare with Computational Language Processing Systems

very fast, seemingly effortless, mostly correct, excellent coverage

Language Processing: Complex

- huge number of words

- polysemic and homonymic words

- infinite number of sentences

- syntactic ambiguity

- role of general world knowledge

- context dependencies

- …


�� It is not surprising that computational language processing systems are not better than they are

�� It is surprising that human language processing is that good as it is

Human Language Processing: Areas

Language Comprehension

Language Production

Language Acquisition


Language Comprehension


Subprocesses of language comprehension?

word recognition(accessing themental lexicon)

parsing (determiningsyntactic structure)

semantic interpretation(word and sentencemeaning)

model construction (referentialrepresentation)

pragmaticinterpretation

Language Production


Subprocesses of language production?

conceptualization

lexicalization syntactic planning

phonologicalencoding

articulation

Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition: Domains


conceptual knowledge

lexical knowledge

syntactic knowledge

semantic knowledge

pragmatic knowledge

first language (L1)

second language (L2)

Psycholinguistics: Meth. Approaches

Psycholinguistics studies the different subprocesses of language comprehension, language production and domains of language acquisition


Methodological approaches in Psycholinguistics

Experiment (central approach)

Computational Modeling

Case Studies (e.g., patients, feral children)

Experiment / Computational Modeling


Experimenttesting a prediction that is derived from a theory

goal: providing empirical support for the theory

Computational Modelingmodeling of cognitive processes (psycholinguistics: language processes)

implementation of theoretical assumptions

requires a precise formulation of the assumptions

goals: simulating of empirical data

derivation of novel predictions (that are to be tested in experiments)

More on Experiments


Experiment- allows for a systematic observation of a particular behaviour

under controlled circumstances- manipulation of conditions � effect on behaviour- testing of prediction: behavioural differences between conditions- observed differences are attributed to manipulation of conditions � conditions should only differ with regard to manipulation

- manipulated variable: independent variable / factor- observed behaviour: dependent variable

- statistical tests: testing whether an observed difference is significant (roughly speaking: whether it is not due to chance)

Experiment: Example


Prediction: Complex temporal sentences are more difficult to process when the order of mention of the two events mentioned in the main and subordinate clause does not match the order of occurrence compared to when there is a match between order of mention and order of occurrence.e.g., Anna baked some cookies, after she baked a cake. / After Anna baked a cake, she baked some cookies.

Material: 16 experimental sentences, each in 2 versions (non-chrono-logical and chronological); 20 filler sentences (to conceal the experiment’s purpose)

Procedure: Participants read the sentences (8 non-chronological, 8 chrono-logical and the fillers) from a computer screen, self-paced (key press � next sentence)Recording of reading times

Independent Variable: order of mention � 2 conditions: non-chronological vs. chronological

Dependent Variable: Reading time

Experiment: Extended Example


Prediction: Non-chronological complex temporal sentences are more difficult to process than chronological sentences, but the difference is larger with the connective after than with the connective beforee.g., Anna baked some cookies, after she baked a cake. / After Anna baked a cake, she baked some cookies. / Before Anna baked a cake, she baked some cookies. / Anna baked some cookies, after she baked a cake.

Material: 32 experimental sentences, each in 2 x 2 versions (non-chronological with after, chronological with after, non-chronological with before, chronological with before); 40 filler sentences

Independent Variables:(1) order of mention: non-chronological vs. chronological(2) type of connective: after vs. before� 2 x2 = 4 conditions

Dependent Variable: Reading time

Methods / Independent Variables


Measuring of timeReading times, Reaction times, Response times, Naming times

Eye-movement data- in written language comprehension- in language production (eye movements on to be described pictures)- in spoken language comprehension� visual-world paradigm: participants listen to words or sentences and

simultaneously view pictures (eye movements on pictures)

Neuroscientific measures – measuring brain activationevent-related potentials (ERP), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Simulating an Experiment


Say the name of the word on the next slide

BLUE



Say the name of the word on the next slide

GREEN



Say the name of the colour on the next slide

BLUE



Say the name of the colour on the next slide

GREEN

Stroop-Effect


What was more difficult / what was easier: word naming or colour naming?

Stroop-EffectColour naming: interference, when colour and word content mismatchWord naming: no interference

Does the Stroop-Effect tell us something about word recognition?

� Stroop-Effect suggests that word recognition is automatic

Read the following text beginning


John was on his way to school. He was terribly worried about themaths lesson.He thought he might not be able to control the classagain today.

Did you encounter difficulties when reading the last sentence?

Why – what’s the problem?

What does this tell us about text comprehension?

Comprehension can be constrained by inferences

Suppose, you wanted to test the inference-effect in an experiment� How would you do this?

Why to bother about Psycholing.?


- insights from psycholinguistic research may sometimes be helpful with regard to computational linguistics

- there is a trend towards experimental research in linguistics �knowledge about psycholinguistics/experimental methods provides a background to evaluate this work

- local reason : the M.Sc. in Language Science and Technologyincludes the possibility to specialize in ComputationalPsycholinguistics

Computational Psycholinguistics Group


http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/groups/MC/index.html

Academic and Research StaffProf. Dr. Matthew Crocker (head of the group)Dr. Afra AlishahiDr. Berry Claus

PhD StudentsEmilia EllsiepenJudith KöhneGarance ParisMaria StaudteJuliane Steinberg

Research in the Group


Computational modeling- probabilistic and connectionist models- topics

- lexical processing (bilingual)- syntactic processing- situated language processing (i.e., within a visual environment)- language acquisition

Experimental- behavioural experiments- topics

- lexical processing (situated, bilingual)- sentence processing (syntactic, semantic)- text comprehension- human-robot interaction

Central Method: Eye Tracking


Most of the experiments conducted in the Computational Psycholinguistics group are eye tracking studies within the visual world paradigm (presentation of visual scenes + spoken linguistic stimuli and monitoring of eye movements which are elicited by the linguistic stimuli)

Some eye-tracking facilities in our labs- Eye Link: head-mounted eye tracker

- Tobii: remote eye tracker (eye-tracking hardware is embedded in a monitor)

- faceLab: remote eye-trackers (which can be cascaded to track headorientation and eye gaze in up to 270°)

Eye LinkTobiifaceLab

lab tour

In what follows


Individual presentations by the group members

Juliane Steinberg: lab tour incl. a presentation on speech mediatedattention in virtual environments

Garance Paris: bilingualism and lexical competition

Emilia Ellsiepen: interplay of language processing and visualworking memory in situated languagecomprehension

10:30 - 11:00 coffee break

Maria Staudte: utility of gaze in human-robot interaction

Judith Köhne: syntactic priming in language production

Afra Alishahi: computational modeling of child languageacquisition

Berry Claus: embodied language comprehension and sentence mood

Documents

Psycholinguistics - uni-saarland.de is Psycholinguistics? - Which psychological and neurological factors underlie language acquisition, language production and language comprehension?